Britain's Prince Harry has sparked a major controversy for attending a costume party dressed as a Nazi soldier.
The photo of Prince Harry, drink in one hand and cigarette in the other, and wearing a khaki uniform with a swastika armband, is splashed across the front page of The Sun, Britain's largest circulation newspaper.
The 20-year-old prince has issued a written apology, but it has done little to quell the outrage that the grandson of Queen Elizabeth, and the man third in line to the British throne, should have gone to a costume party dressed as a German Nazi.
The chairman of Britain's Holocaust Educational Trust, Greville Janner, told British television the affair shows that Prince Harry has not been properly educated about the horrors of World War II.
"There are too many people in Britain and elsewhere whose lives have been wrecked by the Nazis, whose families have been murdered by the Nazis, whose sons maybe have been killed by the Nazis," he said. "It is too close to the war, too close to the Holocaust, and really a senseless way to behave."
A former spokesman for Buckingham Palace, Dickie Arbiter, says Harry has been an embarrassment to his father, Prince Charles, with this affair coming after previous incidents of Harry smoking marijuana and brawling with a photographer. Mr. Arbiter points out that Prince Harry is due to enter a military academy in May, and he can expect some tough discipline.
"There have been people calling for him not to go to the army. I think this is probably the best thing," he said. "This is one way of him knuckling down to discipline given by third parties and third parties that he's not going to answer back to."
The leader of Britain's main opposition party, Michael Howard, says Prince Harry's written apology does not go far enough, and he calls on the prince to make a personal public appearance to say he is sorry.
There are also calls for the prince to go with his uncle, Prince Edward, to the ceremony in two weeks to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz, Poland, where a million Jews were exterminated.
